


chunnacas na mairbh beò

by romans



Category: Outlander Series - Diana Gabaldon
Genre: AU, Gen, Very AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 09:51:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,439
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2808161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/romans/pseuds/romans
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jemmy and Roger and her mother and father lived and died two hundred years ago, and no amount of hurrying will bring them back to her, or return her to them. They’re already gone. They’re still alive. Brianna sits down, slowly, against the ghost of a wall, and drops her head into her hands. She has all the time in the world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	chunnacas na mairbh beò

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Katherine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Katherine/gifts).



> Prompt: "I’m especially interested in Brianna during the latter part of Drums of Autumn," and anything to do with being a mother. (I long assumed that she would leave Jem and return to her own time, so an alternate version of events around that would be amazing to get to read.)"
> 
> [Note: I'm still mid-series, book-wise, so bear with me and this AU thing.]

Afterwards, she feels- _hollow_.

She feels, sometimes, like she is one of the Dutch women they'd found at Fraser's Ridge, caught up in a maelstrom of fire and charred down to blackened bones. Her life had been stripped away in one screaming instant-

Her memories of the crossing are hazy, at best. She wonders sometimes if the neurons that fired in 1773 ever made contact with the ones that sparked, milliseconds later, in 1977.

She spent a month watching her mother watch her, dark-eyed and sharp-faced, mouth set mulishly as she pounded and scraped and brewed up concoctions and tisanes to try to combat the sickness spreading through Brianna’s body. There was no lump to excise, Claire had explained, and-

And it had been stay and die, or leave and pray that she woke up in a time with modern medicine.

"If you get any frailer," Claire had said, pouring Blood-Root tea down Brianna’s throat, "the crossing will kill you." She pressed the tiny bag of precious stones into Brianna’s shaking hand, and followed the tea with a shot of whiskey. "You can die here at home, or you can _try_.”

She looked older than her years, for the first time in Brianna’s recollection. Jamie had been standing in the doorway to her sickroom, his face set like it was carved out of stone.

"Go back," he had said, when she looked at him with a questioning gaze. "I’ll look after them, lass."

Roger and Jemmy had curled around her in the dark that night. She buried her face in Jemmy’s soft hair, twined her arms through Roger’s, and spent the night listening to Roger’s familiar silence, to her son’s sweet whistling snores.

The rest was fogged with pain and distance. Only the fact of her imminent death, of Claire’s hand on her back, had given her the strength to go through with it. She knows she kissed Jemmy one last time, kissed Roger. She remembers pressing Jemmy into Claire’s arms.

And then everything had been screaming, all around her, and she had been spat out with a physical wrench, and deposited, delirious and alone, just outside of Lenoir, North Carolina, in the Year of Our Lord 1977.

+

The next year of her life, all hospitals and concerned policemen, she locks away in the back of her mind, never to be recalled again. Her mother's old friend, Doctor Abernathy, speaks for her with the police; spins them a tale that settles their minds and answers their lingering questions. He holds her hand through the pain. She has one friend in this world, and that is enough. She survives.

She trades on her father’s name, invokes Frank Randall’s scholarly reputation and aging connections to old men in dust-filled rooms, worms her way into private collections of letters and books all across America. She researches every aspect of early American history, devours primary sources like they’re her lifeblood, and winnows through thousands upon thousands of pages in exhaustive detail, searching for-

Well, searching for her family. For signs of their lives, of Jemmy’s life.

They must, after all, have found a way to send a message down through time to her. A book, a letter, a song (her reputation as an ethnomusicologist circles the world, after a few years; the breadth of her knowledge is unparalleled in living memory)- something must be out there, just waiting to be uncovered.

Bills of sale, land deeds, tenancy agreements, receipts- nothing is too obscure for Brianna Randall Fraser Mackenzie, and she turns out to have a knack for turning the dullest historical topic into a vivid account of life in another world, another time. Her “pop” history books do very respectably, and garner her a reputation as a gifted author.

Brianna downs anti-depressants, writes down what she remembers (hangings and house fires, the shock of a rifle against her shoulder, Jem’s golden cap of curls, her husband’s breath in the night-), and keeps on hunting for her family.

She pulls strings and stretches her meager funds, and begs and borrows and very nearly steals the money she needs to survey and excavate the patch of land that used to be Fraser’s Ridge. Some things haven’t changed: the familiar grey sweep of trees takes her breath away and leaves her floundering for a moment, waiting for Rollo to come bounding out of the woods to greet her; but there are only the jeeps and land rovers her students are unloading, splattered with mud from the road.

She wonders if she should get a dog.

The excavation turns up a trove of artifacts dating as far back as the Civil War, and the footings of a building that they tell her might have been a barn, centuries ago. She stands in what would have been a doorway, once, and turns an old coin over and over in her fingers, conjures up the scent of hay and churned mud, the chorus of equine greetings that rang out when she came to tend to her father’s horses.

The site director shows her a line of grey and black ash in one of the trenches, and explains to her that a building had burned down and left it’s mark on the soil. She had been expecting it, but seeing the remains of her home, the tiny, ashy traces of her entire life-

Brianna blinks tears out of her eyes, reminds herself firmly that they had _known_ , that they would have escaped, and scrubs a hand across her mouth.

"That’s really- interesting," she says. The director beams at her, proud of his discovery.

Her hair whips into her face, flying loose in the wind, and when she goes to shove it behind her ears, groping for a hairband in one pocket with her free hand, she sees strands of grey twined with the familiar red.

She’s been hurrying for so long now, as if she had to catch Jemmy before he got too big to know his mother, before he- she shies away from the word _died_. Before it was too late, she thinks.

There is no such thing as too late, maybe. Jemmy and Roger and her mother and father lived and died two hundred years ago, and no amount of hurrying will bring them back to her, or return her to them.

They’re already gone. They’re still alive. Brianna sits down, slowly, against the ghost of a wall, and drops her head into her hands. She has all the time in the world.

"Are you all right, Dr. Randall?"

One of the students is crouched beside her, looking concerned.

"No," Brianna says, to the familiar ground between her feet. "I’m not."

+

Cancer would certainly have been simpler, and more certain. How had her mother stood the half-life that she must have led for so many years, torn between two worlds? How had she borne it?

The idea strikes her like a lightning bolt out of a clear blue sky, and leaves her reeling in her bed in her tiny apartment in Virginia. She wraps herself in her robe and sits at her kitchen table, trailed by the tabby that insinuated himself into her life eight months before. He curls up on the seat beside hers while she opens a bottle of whiskey, and meets her bleak expression with wide-eyed equanimity.

"I am an idiot," she tells him. He blinks at her.

She had left Roger in North Carolina, two hundred years ago, but that doesn’t mean that any message he left for her is in America. Her family has a knack for ending up in unexpected places.

No. Roger was clever ( _is_ clever, she thinks, fiercely). There was one place he knew of for certain, where anything he wrote would be kept safe and passed down until his era; one way to ensure a message reached her in the future. She hadn’t given any thought at all to the piles and piles of boxes his parents had left him; it hadn’t occurred to her that anything in it might date to any earlier than the Edwardian era.

But Roger- Roger would know, would see that if he managed to pass something down for her by entrusting it to his family, it would end up locked away in a house in Inverness, left to molder and rot for decades while they skipped through time and back again.

But it would be there. That was certain. Or perhaps it was in storage, now. She was almost certain he hadn’t thrown it out. Probably the Historical Society of Inverness had gotten ahold of it.

She hopes to God that they have.

+

Roger's message has been waiting for her for a long, long time when she finally finds it.

The Wakefield Collection is blessedly whole, curated in a state of benign neglect by members of the Inverness Historical Society. Some of it is still in boxes, and some of the books have been shelved, but what Brianna wants to see- what she has been searching for for half her life, now- is wrapped in a protective cloth cover and stored in an archival box.

"This is the oldest document we have in the collection," the librarian tells her. "It’s a bit of an oddity, actually. Everything else dates from the late Victorian era, but this is much older. We’re not sure how it came to be included in the Reverend’s files."

"Thank you," Brianna says, absently. She tugs protective gloves over hands that have started shaking.

"This" is a diary, bound in leather and inscribed with the initials _B.F.M._ The spine has split and it’s clearly missing pages, and the cover is blotched and warped with age, but it’s still legible.

It’s still here. All these years, and Roger’s gift to her is right where he left it.

"It’s empty," the librarian says helpfully, and Brianna almost screams.

"Except-" the woman continues cheerfully, "For, eh, an odd little line- look-"

She uses a white-gloved finger to flip to the third page, where someone- Roger- has carved a line into the paper, pressing down hard with a quill.

_Inverness. We’re coming through the Stones._

"We think it may have been someone’s travel diary that they lost en route to Inverness, perhaps- you can never tell, but that’s my pet theory," the librarian says. "I suppose we’ll never know."

Brianna traces the written lines very gently, and lets the journal fall closed.

"You never know," she says.

+

She moves to Inverness, because what else could she possibly do? Roger had passed a message down to her over three hundred years, asking her to wait for him at the stones.

So she waits.

She settles into a little flat, not too far from Cragh na Duin, as the crow flies. Her cat follows after, and after a little while she adopts a lop-eared dog, who follows her on her daily walks to the stones, his tongue sliding between his black gums, his eyes bright with devotion.

She waits. She reminds herself of all the old songs, all the songs about coming home, that have been passed down through generations, in Gaelic and in English. The Gaels know how to come home. She knows they probably won’t come through until one of the Great Days- on a Samhain or a Beltane, perhaps. If any of them had made it through earlier they would have tracked her down, she has no doubt of that. She hasn’t missed them.

Aside from that, all she can do is wait.

They come through on a blustery Midsummer’s day. She wakes up at dawn, tingling from her head to her toes, and something in her gut tells her to run-

To run, to run to her car, to race to the stones, still backlit by the rising sun, just faint outlines in the soft darkness. Nights are short this time of year, but the last dregs of starlight are still clinging to the sky above her. She throws herself down in front of the circle, her heart racing, and feels a strange, unmistakeable call-

And then the air hums, and there’s a sound like a shriek, or maybe a thunderclap, and when the sun crests the horizon four figures are splayed out on the ground in front of her.

Roger sits up first, bearded and hollow-cheeked, and he reaches out for the golden-haired boy beside him. Brianna swallows around the lump in her throat and starts making her way up the hill to her family. Her mother is the next to recover, righting herself blearily and shoving her skirts back down around her legs. She glances over at Roger and Jemmy, who are helping each other stand up, and then turns her attention to Jamie, who’s splayed out on the ground like he’s been poleaxed.

 _Galla Diabhaol..._ her father is saying, almost under his breath. He turns his head, still reclining in the mud, and fixes her mother with a sharp eye.

"Are we alive, then?" he asks, and her mother giggles. She stops suddenly, when she catches sight of Brianna cresting the little hill, and rolls to her feet.

"Brianna!" she cries. Jamie pushes himself up, too, and offers a hand to Roger and Jemmy.

" _Mama_ ," Brianna says, as she’s engulfed in her mother’s embrace. Jamie’s arms close around the both of them a moment later, and, after what feels like a long time, her parents release her so that Roger- and Jemmy, poor confused Jemmy, who is alive and well and taller than her- oh, God- can smother her in their arms.

"Roger-" she gasps, eyes suddenly clouded with tears. "I never stopped searching- I found your diary."

"I know," he says, pulling her up for a rough, desperate kiss. "I missed you so much."

"I know-" she says. "I’ve got you."

"What happened?" she asks, stepping away from Roger to turn to her son.

"We had a bit of a bother, ye ken, with Tyron," her father says. He’s surveying the landscape warily, with one arm slung around her mother’s back. "It followed us to Scotland and we thought- well-"

"I wanted to see you," an unfamiliar voice says.

Jemmy. Her little Jemmy. He must be sixteen now, at least.

"Jemmy-" Brianna says, "do you remember me?"

"Mama-" he says, pulling her into his arms, "I never forgot."

She squeezes him tight, closing her eyes against more tears, and rocks him back and forth.

They’re safe.

God only knows what’s ahead of them, now, and she fears for her father, ripped from the only world he’s ever known, but her family is here now.

They’re _home_.


End file.
